


Sherlock Holmes and the Temple of the Four Orders

by busaikko



Category: Sherlock Holmes (2009)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Deathfic, Gen, Ghosts, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-08
Updated: 2010-09-08
Packaged: 2017-10-11 20:51:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/116972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/busaikko/pseuds/busaikko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU.  <em>Being a manuscript written by Dr John Watson concerning a case of Mr Sherlock Holmes's; and narrated in such a peculiar, unworthy, and even absurd nature when compared to the rest of Dr Watson's chronicles that it was suppressed and concealed these many years by Mr Mycroft Holmes, from whose hands it passed, on his untimely death, to mine.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Sherlock Holmes and the Temple of the Four Orders

  
FIRST, let it be said that I had had my hopes for Miss Adler. At the very least, I hoped she would stay and perhaps render succour through a remedy of escapades, cases, and adventures. Failing the continued presence of Miss Adler, then I would have wanted Mary's feelings for me to engender some common sentiment towards Holmes; but alas, she can scarce stand the mention of his name now. Nor can he, I imagine, to be fair, bear hers.

These circumstances left me in the absurd state I found myself this evening. I sat on the settee, as I had for hours, my sole occupation the cultivation of an immense, enraged resentment of Holmes himself, who slumped opposite me in his arm chair in the most uncomfortable, unchanging posture imaginable. My own restlessness was compounded by an acute imagining of the ravages the drug must be having on his person, and in particular on his mind. Holmes' keenness of wit had as often been a torment I bore as the machinery of a brilliance I admired, but he remained my last and best hope, even as my raw terror was converted through the alchemy of distemper and impatience into a most familiar bone-deep exasperation.

Of all this high emotion Holmes remained oblivious. He'd thus far not been roused by any entreaties, shouted threats, or curses. Someone without a medical background might very well have taken him for dead, though I had quickly ascertained that he was not; the shame of mistaking a live man for one dead was still with me, but I had already observed the rise and fall of his chest and the faint flutter of his pulse beneath his skin. His face bore a terrible jagged gash acquired since the final confrontation with Blackwood, as if he had been in a fight and done uncharacteristically poorly. The wound twisted from his temple across his brow perilously close to his eye, and then gouged back across his cheek so that without a surgeon's careful attention the scar will affect the muscles of his face. I had spent the time after this last case with Mary, as seemed both proper and urgent, and Holmes' carelessness with himself as evidenced by this injury struck me now like an unwarranted and irrational accusation of abandonment. I knew well how discomfited Holmes was by my own war injury and by any illness; he would find disfigurement unbearable, loathing as he did all fetters of the body on the freedom of the mind.

I repeated that last thought to myself in my head, and then out loud, as was my habit when trying to commit a clever turn of phrase to memory so that I would be able to work it into my writings at a later date. The thought of freedom warmed me, and I took comfort in it as I had taken comfort in nothing else since the conclusion of the dreadful case of the Temple of Four Orders.

"Talking to oneself is generally a sign of derangement," Holmes said, not stirring at all save to open his eyes to the barest slits. "Am I to talk back to you, I wonder, or have the good manners to overlook this lapse?"

"You've never been all that well-mannered," I replied. "Truly, I would sometimes very much like to meet those who educated you in your youth and castigate them for their miserable failure."

"A heavy burden to lay on the teachers," Holmes said, dropping his feet from the chair and standing with a speed that his body was unable to keep pace with. His legs tangled under him, and he stumbled and fell heavily, but with such resilience as if his bones had been soaked in vinegar. He pressed one palm to the floor, breathed a moment, and then used it to push himself over onto his back. Against the dark fur of the bearskin hearth rug, he looked pale.

"Hello, Holmes," I said, looking down at him.

The gaze he settled on me was one of reproach. "When one has, over the years, formed through habit and proximity a certain fondness -- an accustomisation -- to another's presence, it surely stands to reason -- " He cut himself off, obviously dismayed by his own tongue-tied state, and began again. "Come now, Watson. You must admit that you are dead. I attended your funeral. The probability, therefore, that you are an unfortunate chemical illusion -- not, mind you, unwelcome, but boding ill for my mental faculties -- "

"Holmes," I interrupted, and kicked my foot at his shoulder, though it merely passed through like smoke. "You are blathering. And I must confess that I am most put out, for I certainly have never in any of my studies found proof of an afterlife or of spirits. Indeed, since taking up residence with you, I have been confirmed at every turn that all spiritualism is a matter of tricks of the mind and of deliberate human cunning and deceit."

"Yet you are neither cunning nor deceitful," Holmes said, attempting to catch my ankle and examine the stains of muck and blood which I had been unable to scrub from my boots. He proceeded to ask me a series of questions designed to ascertain that I was not a hallucination; an endeavour whose patently illogical nature I argued in vain whilst answering trivialities about myself and irritably confirming my ignorance of things which Holmes had never confided in me.

"For Heaven's sake, eat something," I finally entreated when he began to repeat himself. "You will make yourself ill."

"At the abattoir," Holmes replied, sitting up neatly, and then pushing to his feet, "when one or the other of us triggered that explosion, several of your fingers fell in front of me." He held his thumb and forefinger before his nose, measuring a distance of about six inches. "I put them in my pocket, though I do swear to you that I returned them." He gave me a wry look. "And thus we find the border both of scientific curiosity and of appetite."

"I felt no pain," I told him, striving for the professional dispassion of a medical man. "Indeed, I feel none now, neither from my old troubles nor any new injury. It is most remarkable," I added, rising and crossing to the cluttered table where Holmes' dinner sat neglected on its tray. "I suppose you'll eat none of the ham -- " Holmes shuddered -- "but the cheese and bread, and the pickles, those cannot possibly offend."

I attempted to raise the knife but was frustrated by my present state. I turned that annoyance to better end by directing it at Holmes, who submitted badly to the consumption of a child-like portion. I further badgered him into drawing a bath and scrubbing himself clean before finally retiring in a bed that I would wager was untouched since our last case.

Whilst Holmes slept I walked the streets of London, taking a route that no sensible person would have travelled at that hour. The gale that had been relentless through the day still roared between the buildings like a steam locomotive, sending clothing into disarray and making the beggar children curl that much closer to their mothers in the scant shelter of doorways. To me, the question of whether the wind was warm or chill, dry or wet, was unanswerable. However, the sky grew low and foreboding with slate-coloured clouds driven down by the winds, and it was obvious that the day would be one of little comfort. I remained abroad until dawn encroached on the heavy sky. I saw the sun rise as pale as wax, all radiance stripped away. It was a sight that filled me with dread and longing like a homesickness, and I hurried back towards Baker Street. I returned to find the fire dead in the fireplace, the curtains still drawn, and Holmes tangled in his bedsheets as though he had been fighting enemies in his sleep.

I kicked the bed, which had no effect, and then I informed Holmes at volume that he had best rouse himself. I learnt a certain tone of command in the army which has always stood me good use; in this instance, it propelled Holmes upright with the most amusing appearance of a long-haired rabbit tangled in a shrub.

I made him dress and shave; rub Handysides ointment into the wound on his face; and comb his hair neatly before summoning his breakfast. Mrs Hudson gave a start when she saw him, accustomed as I imagine she was to his black mood and drugged lassitude. I wished Mrs Hudson a good morning. She paid me no heed. Holmes ceased pacing the length of the room and tried this experiment himself, though his voice was still thick with sleep and rusty, as always when it came to pleasantries and other social lubricants during his periodic ill humours. Mrs Hudson looked quite taken aback; from him I think she heard the words as cheek or some sly insult; but she nodded sharply, wished Holmes as good a day as could be had on a day like this, and shut the door sharply after her as she left.

"Why ever she puts up with you, I still have no idea," I told Holmes, putting my hand through the teapot idly to see if I could perceive any sensation of such intense heat. I could not; it was a most peculiar and vexing state.

"Surely I am allowed my vagrancies when I am yet mourning my dearest friend and colleague, Dr Watson," Holmes replied, watching the teapot experiment with a furrow between his brows.

"Mourning," I repeated, fitting the word with scorn. "Your sentiment hardly does me any good."

"Toast, Watson?" Holmes asked.

I endeavoured to throw a piece at his head, but met with no success.

Watching my growing rage at my own impotence, Holmes sat straighter and straighter in his chair, a posture which had the uncommon effect of making him appear both slight and defeated -- I cannot think of how better to express his appearance, for it was uncharacteristic of him to an extreme, the sort of dignity I have seen women, in particular, wrap about themselves as they are led to the gallows. Yet even thus he was undoubtedly himself, for he said, "See the way, Watson, you deny me not only the consolation of my beliefs, or more properly disbeliefs, but also the wanton irrationality of grief."

I found that I was still capable of laughter. In the face of my mirth, Holmes put down the cup he had raised to his mouth and pushed away from the table, leaving his food wholly untouched.

"This won't do," I called after his retreating form. "I refuse the thankless job of being your keeper."

Holmes appeared through the doorway of his room for the briefest of moments, just long enough for him to fling something at me with force. It passed quite harmlessly through my jacket, waistcoat, shirts, ribcage, and heart, striking the table beyond me with such force that it shattered.

"Mrs Hudson will not be pleased that you have broken another pitcher," I remarked.

"Ha," Holmes said, breathing harder than he ought. "Perhaps she will turn me out. I shall be leaving soon enough, at any rate."

The words and the uncharacteristic passion filled me with unease despite my profession of disinterest, and I crossed to where I could see him. My suspicion had been that he was again turning to the drug which had made of him an insensate lump the previous day, but instead I found him ransacking his room, seizing this or that item, staring at it for a moment, and then either flinging it on the bed or casting it to the floor. Of the brass spyglass, the sextant, the woollen socks, the gaudy broken watch-chain, the folio of some scientific enquiry, and the other oddities accumulating on the bed, I could discern no pattern or clue to their meaning.

"Leaving?" I asked, and Holmes started, though he suppressed the movement, which was unworthy of him.

He waved his arm grandly, as if that conclusion was plain and obvious and I merely too obtuse to perceive this. "These rooms no longer suit my interests," he said, and then looked down at himself as if cataloguing his attire.

"You will stay with your brother?" I asked. "Or will you perhaps travel overseas?"

"I am undecided," he said, scornful and dismissive. He began working his way through his wardrobe, commissioning a scandal of clothing to wrinkle on the floor.

"Maybe retire to the country and take up bee-keeping," I suggested, scathingly.

"The world has, it is true, a greater need of honey than detection." He stopped abruptly, tossed two shirts on the bed, and stared for a long moment at his reflection in his shaving mirror. He ran his fingers through his hair, pushing it back from his face.

I had little patience for this. "Come, Holmes," I said, and he gave me such a glare of dark intense passion that I was struck by the closest thing to physical sensation since waking disembodied. "You want for employment, and it so happens that I find myself incapable of setting down the facts of the wretched Blackwood affair."

He drew a breath in between his teeth. "You surely cannot be thinking of publishing the account of your own death as another of your sensational brochures."

"On the contrary," I retorted. "The case _must_ be published. It was a triumph of rational thought over blind superstition, an exposé of the most craven conjurer's tricks used to incite fear in the ignorant. Without an explanation of the deductions of Sherlock Holmes to cast light into occult places, England itself will remain vulnerable to supernatural delusions."

"So says the hallucination masquerading as the ghost of my dear deceased Dr Watson," Holmes murmured. "Your naïve faith in the common people to appreciate logic over the fantastical narrative is laughable."

"Then you will have to work doubly hard to transcribe my words and make them less, how did you put it, overly romantic and emotional?" I pulled my chin up and crossed my arms, or at least attempted to give the proper illusion of crossed arms. "Fetch your pen and paper, Holmes. You may work at my desk," I allowed, "as yours is so awash in papers and that vile experiment with bread moulds that I've not seen the surface in weeks."

"I am in debt to your kindness," he said in a dry tone accompanied by an arched eyebrow that made of this less of a compliment than a complaint.

He insisted first on mixing his own ink and then on sharpening his pen nib with a fanaticism bordering on compulsion, accompanied by a muttered monologue on techniques of nib-grinding as observed in people of different social classes, educations, and sexes, with a digression into the nibs of left-handed and right-handed persons, and finally an addendum on the effects left-handedness had on personality and criminal temperament. When he had settled into my chair at last, after much cajoling and eruption of temper on my part, he bowed his head before the paper like a schoolboy facing down an examination for which he had not prepared.

I started talking; he commenced to write. As I had no need to pause for breath, the rhythm of our endeavour was that of his pen. The pages filled in a steady, hypnotic cycle, inkpot to paper and back again; it was not until I began narrating the events immediate to my death that I realised that the heavy, drowsy feeling which had overtaken me was in fact my consciousness finally dissipating.

I paused, looking at Holmes in startlement; he gave me a faint, knowing smile.

"It is, perhaps, time we exchanged last words," he suggested, and paused in his writing to look me full in the face.

"Good Lord, no," I exclaimed; the very idea filled me with horror. Holmes had had the rare grace to never burden or tax our friendship with maudlin sentiment, and of that I have ever been glad -- for that is a Pandora's box which once opened suffers not even hope to remain. Holmes' face immediately shuttered, his eyes quickly alight with curiosity, which I saw him satisfy with a study of my countenance, at which he paled with resolution and once more set his pen to the inkwell. "I have my regrets," I continued, "but none are so great as to keep me here past my death. Please convey my love to Mary and my wishes that she find the joy in her life that she brought to mine. Please visit Gladstone every now and then, if Mary permits. And for God's sake leave off the drugs, Holmes. Occupation is to you happiness; don't lose your career to dissolution." He wrote those words as neatly as all the others. I should have been a fool to have expected a reply. "You will need to finish the story," I told him. "Give me your word that you will." He did so immediately without the least hesitation, and I trust him as I trust no other. I felt a lightness, like a ship unmooring; content, now, to go.

**Author's Note:**

> "I usually throw out at least half of what I write because it's self-indulgent, which this fic is: it's the sort of thing that makes me happy (in a what-if sense) but which really has no redeeming value. What it really needs to be is the prologue to an extremely long Holmes series in which Holmes writes all the adventures in Watson's voice because he's around the twist; because as you say, otherwise what is the point?" (from a discussion with Kanata) Sadly, I don't see myself ever writing that epic series, so I guess this has to stand, imperfectly, by itself.


End file.
